oment of leisure was thereafter spent in learning this craft.
During the following winter the lad furnished the women of the
neighborhood with good, well-made shoes, and with the money thus
earned he entered Haverhill Academy in April, 1827, being then in his
twentieth year. For the next six months his favorite haunts in field
and wood were unvisited, except on the Saturdays and Sundays
spent with his family. He gained some reputation as a poet by the
publication of the ode which he wrote in honor of the new academy,
and although he returned to the farm after six months of study, it was
only to earn more money for further schooling.

His poems and sketches now began to appear in the different newspapers
and periodicals, and he did some editing for various papers. This
work brought him into notice among literary people, but it was his
political convictions that first gave him a national reputation.

From the first Whittier stood side by side with William Lloyd Garrison
in his crusade against slavery, and many of his best poems appeared in
the _Liberator_, Garrison's own paper. These poems, with others, were
collected in a volume called _Voices of Freedom_. It was these songs,
which rushed onward like his own mountain brooks, that made Whittier
known from one end of the country to the other as an apostle of
liberty. All Whittier's poems of this period belong to the political
history of the country, of which they are as much a part as the war
records.

In all this work there is no trace of bitterness or enmity. His songs
of freedom were but the bugle-notes calling the nation to a higher
humanity. Like the old Hebrew prophets, he spared not his own, and
many of his most burning words are a summons to duty to his brothers
in the North. If he could remind the South that the breath of slavery
tainted the air

"That old Dekalb and Sumter drank,"

he could also, in _Barbara Frietchie_, pay loving tribute to the noble
heart of one of her best-loved sons. His was the dream of the great
nation to be--his spirit that of the preacher who saw his people
unfaithful to the high trust they had received as guardians of the
land which the world had been taught to regard as the home of liberty.
It was this high conception that gave to his work its greatest power,
and that made Whittier, above all others, the poet of freedom; so that
although the mission of these poems has ceased, and as literature they
will not appeal to succeeding